One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

2014 at the Movies: The Battery

(Spoilers ahead. Please
proceed with caution.)

The
zombie milieu has been exhaustively mined for creative and commercial gold in
the last decade, from AMC’s original series The Walking Dead to epic blockbuster
fare such as World War Z (2013).

Certainly, even a dedicated filmmaker would
be hard-pressed to come up with a new dramatic angle for the depiction of the zombie
apocalypse at this juncture.

Yet
the micro-budgeted The Battery (2013) manages just that feat.

The
film -- which plays on the baseball concept of “the battery” (the power generated by a pitcher and catcher working
together) -- is an intimate, male-bonding film that might have been made by
Kevin Smith had he thought of the concept before first time director Jeremy
Gardner did.

What
I mean by that comparison is that The Battery absolutely nails the
lingo and interplay of disenfranchised young men, and concerns like Clerks
(1993) a “buddy” relationship wherein one guy has a problem because of his
philosophy of life, and the other guy tries to relieve him of that problem,
even if the help isn’t wanted, let alone solicited.

Like
Clerks,
The Battery also carries abundant verbal allusions to our collective
pop culture, and is packed, front-to-back, with great indie music.

What
feels so remarkable about The Battery, however, is that it
creates and maintains throughout its running time an authentic sense of danger
and horror. Where the events of Clerks undoubtedly felt like life
and death to Dante and Randal, the events of The Battery are literally life-and-death for the two
friends depicted here: Ben (Jeremy Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim).

Accordingly,
The
Battery culminates in a remarkable final act, one which settles down into
one (cramped) location, and, for much of its duration, consists of a single camera
set-up or shot. In this case, we witness Ben and Mickey trapped in the
back-seat of a car as zombies surround it and increase their number over a
period of days. There is no escape, no
relief, and, finally -- in this crucible of survival -- Mickey and Ben reflect
on their journey.

Gardner’s
clever, intense and uncluttered visual approach to the material not only
generates suspense, much as a similar shot in a tent did in the recent Willow
Creek (2014), but permits audiences to feel and appreciate the ebb and
flow of the Mickey/Ben friendship all the more deeply.

Shot
in just fifteen days, and for six thousand dollars, The
Battery is a film that sneaks up on you, winning you over a scene at a
time, a joke at a time, and a set-piece at a time. It is engaging, smart, and a
breath of fresh air in a sub-genre that risks, even yet, over-exposure. About
half way through a viewing of The Battery you’ll realize that your
defenses are down, and that the movie has affected you in ways you couldn’t
possibly have foreseen when you began it.

“We’re
not going anywhere. That’s the point.”

Sometime
after the zombie apocalypse, former baseball team-mates Mickey (Cronheim) and
Ben (Jeremy Gardner) aimlessly cross the countryside trying to survive. They
move from house to house, woods to woods, finding supplies whenever and
wherever they can.

Some
tensions arise, however, in their relationship, because Mickey refuses to kill
any zombies himself, or even prepare his own food. Ben worries that if something happens to him,
Mickey won’t stand a chance in the new world order. Mickey would rather tune
out with his head-phones and music than confront, head-on, the danger they face
on a daily basis.

One
day, after acquiring walkie-talkies, Mickey overhears a transmission from an
outpost called the Orchard, and a woman named Annie. He wants to go in search
of her, and the compound, so as to return to human civilization, but Ben seems
more afraid of the living than of the dead…

“Nobody’s
going to flip the switch back on.”

I
suspect that if Kevin Smith imagined the zombie apocalypse on film, the result
might look and feel somewhat like The Battery. There’s a lot of funny
back-and-forth dialogue between the two male-leads here, and references, even,
to Jaws
(1975), one of Smith’s favorite films.

In
particular, The Battery references the famous Indianapolis scene on the
Orca, and the moments there of male bonding between Brody, Hooper, and Quint. That’s
an appropriate call-back since The Battery is very much about male
bonding, and about the inter-personal dynamic between Mickey and Ben. The other
horror film referenced in The Battery -- Tremors (1990) -- similarly
is a kind of male-bonding effort, though in that case between Kevin Bacon and
Fred Ward’s dim-witted characters, Val and Earl. But through its allusions, The
Battery specifically asks audiences to remember great friendships/teams
in horror movies past, and then examine Mickey and Ben in the same light.

As
was the case in Clerks, The Battery concerns one world-weary or cynical
character (Randal/Ben), who attempts to resolve the existential crisis of his
friend, the Dante/Mickey character. In the case of Dante, he had to shit or get
off the pot, to quote the film’s dialogue. Dante had to decide what he was
going to do with his life -- work, school, marriage, whatever-- and commit to
it rather than complain about it (“I’m
not even supposed to be here today!”).
Mickey in The Battery experiences a similar but not identical
problem. He can’t let the old,
pre-zombie world go, and, in fact tries to blot out the present. As Ben
realizes, this is a dangerous tendency, and a real problem.

Mickey
lives his life now inside his ear-phones, constantly listening to his favorite
music on a CD player. He stubbornly refuses to partake in the day-to-day requirements
for survival. For example, Ben does the
fishing, and tells Mickey that it might be a “nice trick” for him to learn. Similarly, as the opening scene
reveals, Mickey doesn’t do any of the zombie killing himself. He just stands around, head-phones on, grooving
to his tunes. Ben tries to warn him that
“those things” (the headphones) are
going “to kill” him, but Mickey doesn’t
want to hear it.

One
brilliantly inventive and very funny scene in The Battery actually finds
Mickey masturbating in the back of the car while a female zombie (breasts
visible) paws at the window just inches away. Even then -- when confronted with
a monster that wants to kill him -- Mickey won’t put aside his fantasy existence
and confront reality as it is.

My
favorite visualization in the film, however, finds Mickey hanging up blankets
and towels over all the car windows when he is trapped inside it at another
juncture. He believes he can put up
make-shift curtains, and deny the existence of the world right outside his
window. This is a perfect visual
explanation of his world view. Hang up curtains, and forget that zombies are
drooling at the windows. What you deny, or don’t acknowledge can’t hurt you,
right?

By
contrast, Ben is eminently more practical in his approach to life. He knows how
to survive, and is constantly “aware”
of all that his happening around him. He has embraced “the hunter-gatherer” life-style not because he is a tough guy or a
survivalist, but perhaps because -- in his capacity as a catcher -- he is used
to life throwing curve-balls at him.

Ben
attempts to help Mickey confront his life as it is now (and will be, going
forward…) and in one scene takes that quest much too far, endangering Mickey’s
life in the process. But Ben wants
Mickey to survive, and that point is abundantly clear even when he makes a
mistake.

But
Ben is not perfect, as his mistake reveals. He is cynical and cruel at times,
and he believes he knows best how Mickey should live. He expects the worst of
people, and there is some part of him that would rather deal with zombies than
with the possibility of other survivors, people who might interrupt the life (with
Mickey) he feels he has now mastered.

This
odd-couple dynamic eventually comes down to Mickey and Ben’s feelings about
women. Mickey ends up talking on a walkie-talkie to a stranger named Annie, and
Ben says Mickey imagines her as a “post-apocalyptic
pixie girl” with a scar that doesn’t diminish her good looks, and a holster
on her (shapely) hips.

Ben’s
visualization is a lot less romantic (a heavy-set “bull-dyke,” to quote the film precisely) but the conversation
points out, once more, the very real contrast between friends; between Mickey’s
fantasy-life or romanticism and Ben’s realism/cynicism. Yet the surprising and nice thing about The
Battery is that at critical junctures it leaves open the possibility
that life could pitch that proverbial curve ball at either Mickey or Ben…and
Annie proves to be one of them.

And
what’s also ironic and touching about The Battery is that, from a certain
perspective Ben (like Randal in Clerks) is perhaps a bit romantic
about one particular thing: his relationship with his friend. I don’t mean “romantic” literally in this
sense, but rather that Ben believes they are best friends, and this isn’t
exactly so. In a heart-breaking scene,
Mickey reveals to Annie that it isn’t really that way at all; that he and Ben
travel together out of circumstances and twists of fate, but not what he
considers true friendship. Instead, they are, in Mickey’s words “from different social circles.” That phrase hurts almost as much as a zombie
bite.

Ben
doesn’t see it this way, and the last moments in the film serve as powerful (and
indeed, emotional) reminders of how much he needs Mickey in his life. The
protector must have someone to protect, after all. The buddy must have his best friend, or it
all falls apart. You can’t have a guy
like Randal or Ben without a Dante or Mickey, or they have no purpose any more,
no reason to live.

Once more, this
notion is reflected in the title and the film’s central metaphor, that of the
baseball battery. A battery requires a
catcher and a pitcher. The “battery” is a combination of their two
strengths, working in unison. Subtract one piece, and the battery is dead.

The
Battery
remains so impressive a work of art because it isn’t afraid to go to some legitimately
surprising and uncomfortable places. I
mentioned the masturbation scene above, and it’s some kind of bizarre
high-water mark for the genre, something that, in the moment, seems if not
inevitable at least understandable, given male nature.

And
the film’s final act, set in the car interior with zombies clawing at the
exterior, reveals a confidence not often seen in first-time filmmakers. Another
filmmaker might feel the necessity to move out of that car, to open up the
story, to change the scenery. The
Battery just stays there, night and day, as food and water run out, and
Mickey and Ben grow ever more desperate and despondent. The siege set-up goes all the way back to
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), of course, but rarely in a
zombie movie have we stayed in such a restrictive siege scenario -- a cramped
back-seat -- for such a duration. Yet it
works beautifully, and answers all our questions about the Mickey and Ben
friendship.

The
Battery’s
denouement can be interpreted from two perspectives, simultaneously. The first
is that Mickey has finally become the friend Ben hoped he would be, and has
taken on the responsibility for the battery’s survival. He has grown into the friend Ben desired him
to be. The second is that Ben has failed his best friend, and coddled him too
much, because Mickey is not, clearly, ready to take on the challenge the world
puts before him.

In efforts such as World War Z we’ve seen the zombie film go big and spectacular,
and even watched ghoul hordes climb walls hundreds of feet high, resembling
nothing so much as teeming ants on a hill. Yet the zero-budget The
Battery achieves more with so much less by adopting the opposite tack;
by tracking the simple story of two buddies and their remarkable friendship as
the zombie apocalypse endures. The Battery goes small and intimate,
and in the process absolutely hits one out of the park.

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About John

award-winning author of 27 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).

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